` It is very painful to watch bombs falling on the city where you were born. At
the same time I believe that what is happening is good for the future of Serbia
and the Serbs. They have found themselves in the blind alley of a policy like a
bus without brakes that has been running downhill for the past ten years. At
some point, clearly, it must hit a wall. But the West made a big mistake when it
failed to condemn the Yugoslav forces and Milosevic for the genocide they had
committed. Having committed one genocide in Bosnia, they are now conducting a
new one in Kosova.

If Milosevic and Co. were to be sent to The Hague, the situation in Serbia would
be wholly transformed. Many would then say that what has happened is positive,
and that it can help change the history of the Serbian people by stopping the
terrible historical fall it has experienced. The West, I believe, would be
sympathetic. But Milosevic must be defeated before this can happen.

I will tell you something that I have told no one before. In 1990 Ante Markovic
[Yugoslavia's last prime minister] invited me to visit him. When I arrived, he
suggested I should stand as an independent candidate against Milosevic, and that
his [Reformist] party would support me. I told him it was unwise for his party
to participate in the Serbian elections, when it had not done so in the Sloveni
an or Croatian ones. He would in any case lose the elections, and it would be
better for him to rely on his position as federal prime minister. He said that
he had to stop Milosevic. My response was that it would be better immediately to
arrest Milan Babic [later head of `Republika Srpska Krajina'] for menacing the
territorial integrity of Croatia by unconstitutional means; and that in the
event that Milosevic tried to help Babic, he should arrest Milosevic too. After
that he could place Tudman under house arrest, to show that there was a differ
ence between them. Markovic asked: ``You propose arrests?'' I told him that
without them there would be a bloodbath. His answer was: ``I have my economic
reform''.

I would be ready to defend Milosevic at The Hague, provided he agreed that the
defence should be based on the argument that he was not the only person
responsible, that he shares his guilt with many others in Serbia. One man indeed
ÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÔ
cannot on his own accomplish what he has done. '

Srda Popovic, Belgrade-born lawyer and founder of the weekly Vreme, now living
in the New York area, Feral Tribune (Split), 19 April 1999